


Somewhere Like This Before

by goddessofpainandagony



Series: Phantoms [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Angst, Cassandra Cain is Batgirl, Dick Grayson Needs a Hug, Dubious Science, Emphasis on hurt, Fanfiction, Forget About Canon Please, Human Experimentation, Hurt Dick Grayson, Hurt/Comfort, Jason Todd Needs A Hug, JayDick Summer Exchange, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Prompt Fill, Protective Dick Grayson, Protective Jason Todd, Stephanie Brown is Spoiler, maybe? - Freeform, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:34:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25796728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goddessofpainandagony/pseuds/goddessofpainandagony
Summary: In one world, Jason and Dick traverse an apocalypse looking for missing family and holding on to what they have left. In another world, Dick has been separated from his family and is trying to survive captivity. In both worlds, Jason and Dick love each other as everything else falls apart.
Relationships: Dick Grayson/Jason Todd
Series: Phantoms [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1871488
Comments: 12
Kudos: 72
Collections: JayDick Summer Exchange 2020





	Somewhere Like This Before

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sohii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sohii/gifts).



> So here is my offering for the JayDick Summer Exchange. A big thank you to [sohii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sohii/pseuds/sohii) for the prompt. I sorta ran with it, but I hope you like it! <3 
> 
> And I also want to thank [forgettheghosts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgettheghosts) for being a wonderful beta. Thanks for the help, you were perfect!
> 
> And finally, thank you to the mods for running the exchange! We all have a lot of new JayDick to enjoy now.
> 
> This is my first exchange and it's been a real great experience thanks to all of you and the kind souls at the discord freaking out with me in these last days before the deadline. It's been a lot of fun, and I hope you like what I did with this one!

“Tired, Jaybird?”

The taunt came just as Jason stumbled to a stop, propelling him back into movement. Not that he  _ had  _ been tired. Traversing the terrain of a wrecked city didn’t come to him as easily as it did Dick, but he could keep up with Goldie any day of the week. Still, Jason couldn’t help but smile at the obvious laughter in Dick’s voice. Not that anyone could see it, under the helmet.

“Not a chance, Dickhead,” Jason replied anyway, because it was expected. He knew if he didn’t do it, the light mood would be ruined and Dick’s laughter would drain away and even though Jason wouldn’t be able to see it from behind he’d still know Dick had gone back to that pinched, worried expression he’d defaulted to after…well, after the end of the world. Jason was too used to loss by the time the apocalypse rolled around, and Dick probably should have been the same. But things still hit Dick the same as always, and since they still hadn’t been able to find Bruce or Stephanie in the chaos that was left, he was solemn and perpetually brooding. Dick had only just recently returned to his brighter, sarcastic attitudes. Or at least, he was faking it better.

Jason had long ago built a layer of scar tissue against things like dead friends and family. It hurt, still, but he wasn’t going to bleed out anymore. Instead, Jason was going to find them. He was going to find Roy and Stephanie and, hell, even Bruce if it would make Dick feel better. He’d scour every broken city left on Earth if Dick would stop shaking apart in Jason’s arms at night. Though Dick was so good at hiding his pain, Jason was at least grateful to be allowed into those moments. It was better than Dick going through it alone. Jason cherished the moments when Dick was smiling and snarking like it was a normal Tuesday, but he carried the intimacy of the dark moments like a medal, a proof that Dick Grayson trusted Jason Todd more than anything else in the whole, broken world.

“Then you’re up for a race?” And Dick shot off with a sudden burst of speed without waiting for a reply, leaving Jason to chase after him. It felt familiar, even if the scenery was anything but. Shattered concrete, crumbled buildings, and towering heaps of rubble where there used to be skyscrapers, filthy Gotham streets, and enough crime to keep a family of vigilantes busy for decades. But this, the act of patrolling, chasing after his boyfriend and letting him win just to give Goldie something to tease him about, all of this was familiar territory to Jason.

Dick came to a stop ahead of him, scanning the collapsed first floor of the building in front of them intently. His Nightwing suit stood out in the broad daylight, but there wasn’t anything to do about that; nights had become infinitely more dangerous than the day. It was the same suit Dick wore before the apocalypse, but Jason didn’t like how it looked on him anymore. Dick wore the form-fitting black armor like a cowl he’d been forced into, like he was wearing Batman’s suit instead of his own. Like he had already decided that there would always be a Batman and that if Bruce wasn’t there to be it then Dick would have to. It looked  _ wrong,  _ now. Jason slowed and opened his mouth to ask if  _ Dickhead  _ was getting tired now but noticed that he was starting to crouch and had stopped scanning the mess that used to be a building, zeroed in on something.

“See something?” Jason asked, sauntering over to push his leg against Dick’s spine. Just a little, just a signal that he was there and waiting. Just enough for Dick to push back and lean against him in return. His free hand found the back of Dick’s head, a comfort. There had been several false alarms over the short weeks after the apocalypse, and most of them had come from Dick’s overwhelming desire to find a clue to his missing family. Tim, Damian, and Cass were with them, but that left a lot of family in the wind. In those circumstances, a man could see something in nothing.

“There,” Dick answered, and pointed towards the east end of the building. Jason narrowed his eyes, searching for whatever Dick had seen in the broken cement and crumbled structures. It took several moments for him to spot the thin red glint through the bright noon sun. “What is it?”

“Only one way to find out.” Jason tried to inject his grim declaration with some levity, some flirt, but fell short of the mark. There were very few things they knew for certain so soon after the end of the world, but one of the biggest was the fact that there  _ were  _ enemies out there. Dangerous enemies, that took out the world and left only a few stragglers to pick off later. A mysterious red light in a demolished Gotham building would only mean trouble, Jason was sure. But they also knew that if Bruce or Stephanie were still alive then trouble would be the best place to find them. Jason took the lead into the street, followed closely by Dick, picking his way across the rubble to the target. He had to stoop low to duck under a large piece of cement secured by bent rebar sticking out of the ground, almost sliding in on his stomach, and then he was in a dark and musty cave formed by the collapse of the building. His eyes adjusted quickly, taking in the thin rod with the red light at the center of the opening and then the body lying several feet to the side.

“Stephanie!” Dick pushed forward and checked for a pulse, leaving Jason to follow and work on pulling off the rope of soft cloth binding her legs together. The red light had started blinking, Jason noticed. It was positioned above their heads and in front of what might have been an opening further into the collapsed building. Stephanie stirred, moaned, and Dick cradled her head between his hands. “Stephanie, can you hear me?”

What might have been a garbled “Dick” fell from her mouth, and Jason tore the bindings wide enough to pull them over her ankles and off, tossing them into the corner. “We need to get her out of here,” Jason said, and looked up to see that Dick was already gathering her shoulders and head in his arms. Jason took her feet and backed out of the alcove. He had to drop Stephanie’s feet to crawl out and once he was in the street, he pulled Stephanie’s prone form through the low entrance and into his arms to carry her a few feet from the hole they’d found her in. The red light was still blinking.

“D’ck?” Stephanie mumbled indistinctly, head flopping on Jason’s shoulder in an effort to look around. In the light, Jason could see her face was bruised and her hair matted with blood. When she saw Dick crawling into the street she began struggling against Jason’s grip, trying to throw herself towards him. And screaming. “DICK!”

Dick’s head jerked up in the same moment the red light stopped blinking and went out completely. As if some asshole God had turned the stability of the Earth from one hundred down to zero, the ground immediately began bucking and shifting under Jason’s feet. He fell to his knees as the street rolled under him and looked back to Dick in time to see him pitch back into the hole before the rebar snapped and the rubble collapsed down. There was an impossibly loud cracking, breaking sound that drowned out Stephanie’s screams, and then the ground settled under Jason.

He dropped Stephanie to the street and pushed his way to the collapsed building with all his force, pulling rubble aside and digging through the pain of bruised and bleeding hands. The stone cut through his gloves, pummeled his fingertips, an unrelenting obstacle between Jason and the man he loved. And when he had dug down to the fucking cave beneath the mess, with scraped and punished hands and an aching back from his stooped position and ringing ears from the terrible sound of a falling building and Stephanie’s half-crazed ramblings, Jason didn’t even get the satisfying relief of saving Dick. Because Dick wasn’t there.

* * *

Dick couldn’t tell the torture from the experiments.

He had decided there were experiments, finally, but he still thought some of it had to be torture. He also didn’t know what the experiments were supposed to be testing. Maybe the limits of a human vigilante’s abilities, endurance? Maybe these crazy scientists that thought experimenting on children and chaining men to walls for their research was reasonable, maybe these scientists thought the best way to test Nightwing’s endurance was to beat him until he broke. Take vial after vial of blood, run electricity through his body, collect hair and skin samples, starve him.

It was the collection of his DNA that tipped him off. He could understand the first several vials and hair samples they took. There’s a lot a villain can do with that kind of thing, ranging from framing him for a crime to discovering his identity. But when they kept doing it after each new torture, each new  _ experiment, _ it became clear that they were  _ looking  _ for something. They were testing his blood, his DNA, expecting to see something new each time they took a sample.

What they were looking for, Dick couldn’t tell. He was too tired, too starved and dehydrated and in pain, too  _ distracted _ to really think it through. It had taken him too long to figure out they were looking for anything at all, and that knowledge alone wasn’t going to get him out of his chains and out to find Damian, find his  _ Robin  _ who was definitely in pain and probably being experimented on too. Dick could hear it sometimes, long after the torture had ended in his cell. Damian’s cries, shouts of pain. Never begging, though. Not yet.

Dick couldn’t count days in his cell. There were no windows, no light except what his tormentors brought with them, and when the door swung open for his next session of pain there was only artificial light in the bare hall outside. Dick thought they were underground, thought there must be other cells off that hall and one of them must lead to Damian, thought there had to be a large, occupied building above their heads for the labs to test his samples in and to supply his torture from. It felt like years that Dick had been locked in that small room, years of time blurring by, esperiments falling into each other, and he’d already forgotten how he’d gotten to the room in the first place. He should have known if they were underground, shouldn’t have had to guess all that he knew about the building he was being held in. That Damian was being held in.

The first time Dick heard a scream that unmistakably belonged to Damian he had to be sedated to stop him from twisting against his chains and hurting himself. He’d woken up to a man in a lab coat checking his newly bandaged wrists, which stung like hell from being cut against unrelenting metal. And more needles, of course, more vials of blood to be drawn. It was after that day that Dick had decided the notion of waiting for the cavalry wasn’t going to work. He wasn’t going to wait for a rescue when Damian was in pain.

His resolve, however, did little to affect his predicament. He was still constantly chained and immobile, he’d been unable to gather any useful information, and the torture hadn’t slowed long enough for him to catch a break and just  _ think. _ Dick had to admit, whoever these assholes were they were clearly professionals. Dick wasn’t the first person they’d done this to.

And, in the end, it seemed his resolve didn’t change one thing about waiting for a rescue.

When the door swung open earlier than Dick had been expecting, too soon after the last time, he almost started crying if not for the dehydration. The hand he was missing nails on was still oozing blood slowly and whatever they’d done to his ankle kept him in constant pain even when he didn’t put any weight on it and hung from his aching wrists instead. Another session of experimentation or torture or both, whatever they thought they were doing to him, it wasn’t on the table right now. Surely, this would be too much.

But the hand that cupped his face, firm when he tried to pull away, wasn’t painful. The fingers running through his hair didn’t pull any out, didn’t grab him by the roots and slam his skull against the brick wall. And the first thing the man in front of him said wasn’t an insult or a threat, but a shaking and quiet, “Dick?”

_ “Jason?” _ Dick asked in disbelief, and then started coughing. His throat, bone dry and aching for water, had  _ not _ appreciated even that small sound. Jason looked different from the last time Dick saw him, more worn down and exhausted. Dick remembered Jason in their bed the day he’d been taken. Dick woke up first with the dawn and had watched the rising light chase shadows across Jason’s face. In sleep, all his angry lines and hard ridges were smoothed out and he almost looked his age, almost looked youthful again.

This Jason had more lines in his face, more weight pulling his shoulders and the corners of his mouth down. The shadows under his eyes were heavy and oversaturated. As he started working on picking Dick’s cuffs his eyes were narrowed and critical. It all made Dick want to kiss the sides of his mouth, the darkness under his eyes, the new lines between his eyebrows as he glared. Dick wondered idly, as his arm fell for the first time since he’d been in the cell, if all that kissing would smooth Jason back to that sleepy memory he loved so much.

When Dick’s other arm fell his legs couldn’t hold his weight, especially the right ankle that fucking  _ screamed  _ under him, and he fell into Jason’s solid chest. The fingers of his uninjured hand ran over the leather of Jason’s jacket and he almost pulled himself up to start that kissing he’d been thinking of. But there were more important things at the moment, and kissing could wait.

“D-” Dick started and stopped to cough into Jason before he could continue in a hoarse voice. “Damian? He…he’s here-”

“We got him already,” Jason interrupted. He started pulling Dick to the door, which was propped open with his Red Hood helmet, but Dick resisted the tugging and frowned. He wasn’t going anywhere until he  _ knew  _ something, some more about where his kid was.

“We? Who?”

“B and Spoiler are going through the lower levels looking for captives. Batgirl is taking the rest of this floor. RR took the hell spawn to the labs to fuck that shit up. We’re gonna go check that everything’s broken down, yeah? And then we can get out of here.” This time, Dick let Jason half-carry him to the door, where he collected the helmet before they continued into the empty hall. At least Dick had the consolation of being right about the labs and being underground. The downside of that had to be going up the stairs with a fucked up ankle.

The upside turned out to be that the labs were in suitable chaos, which meant they’d all be going home as soon as Dick could expect. Damian was in his full Robin suit, Dick noted, the same as himself. It seemed these people hadn’t been interested in unmasking their prisoners. Whatever Tim and Damian had done, there were no scientists left in the room and only a few guards that had already been knocked out and searched for weapons. Tim was waiting with a flash drive in the main computer impatiently while Damian took a borrowed bo staff to the machines lining the walls.

“Go monitor the brat, we can watch this,” Jason told him. Dick suspected his real motivation was being able to set Dick against the table the computer was occupying, but since it took the pressure off his ankle he certainly wasn’t complaining. Tim took in his appearance, frowned in concern, and then conceded flash drive duty to Dick in favor of stopping Damian from having  _ too _ much fun dismantling the scientists’ research. Dick could see why they let Damian in here despite being a hostage that same day; it seemed breaking things was having a cathartic effect. Dick could relate-after being in that cell, he was tempted to let out some aggression. “You’re alright?”

“Don’t you dare pick me up,” Dick warned when Jason moved suspiciously close and swung an arm across his shoulders. Dick’s ankle might hurt like a bitch but he wasn’t about to sign up for the embarrassment of being carried out of this place like a damsel in his boyfriend’s arms. Especially not in front of his family, in front of  _ Damian. _

“Whatever you say,” Jason agreed, hands up in surrender. He was watching Dick closely, too close, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. As if Dick would disappear the second he was out of sight. It made Dick wonder how long he’d been gone, if it was as long as it had felt. That stirred up uncomfortable emotions, ones tied to memories of things Dick had made an art of avoiding, so he turned to the computer to avoid Jason’s unblinking stare. The download completed, and Dick made himself the bare minimum of useful by removing the drive.

“Robin, slow down,” Tim shouted, and before Dick could turn on his injured ankle Jason was already striding over, yelling at Damian to knock it off. When Dick caught sight of them, at the wall to his left, the machine Damian had been battering was sparking rather than dying. Something seemed to be revving up but, going by the shuddering and grating sounds, it was doing it wrong.

“Get down!” Jason called, and jumped into action first, tackling Tim away from the machine. It was beginning to shake, getting louder-working its way up to what Dick could only assume would be a bang. And Damian was right in the blast zone, if that was so. Dick reacted almost before he’d finished sizing up the situation and screeched when he pushed off his ankle because  _ fuck, that fucking hurt. _ But it propelled him forward enough to get a grip on Damian’s shoulder and gave him the momentum to throw his kid behind him, to safety. Unfortunately, the same momentum put him closer to the malfunctioning machinery than Damian had been and Dick hadn’t exactly thought of a plan for that.

His ankle twisted under him, refusing to take any weight at all, and Dick hit the floor right before that  _ bang  _ he’d known was coming. Dick thought he heard someone yelling his name behind the noise of an explosion and then his vision was engulfed by a too-bright light and all his other senses faded away.

* * *

Jason wasn’t exactly proud of what he did after failing to find Dick, but he committed to it anyway.

He dragged Stephanie, still delirious and rambling, to some cover out of sight. Then he set out a flare. Tim had been working on some communication equipment, but they had to salvage every bit of scrap they could and work was slow going. Neither Dick nor Jason had been willing to wait for him to finish, so they went out with flares and didn’t let Damian come searching with them. Jason had been crazy enough to risk his neck with no backup, but no one was going to let the kid try that.

“D’ck,” Stephanie murmured while looking right into Jason’s helmet, back to slurring after a few moments of clarity. Jason patted her leg awkwardly and wondered how hard she’d been hit on the head. Who had tied her up and left her with that machine. If she knew what had happened to Dick, but was too confused to tell him.

It was Tim who responded to the flare, and in a reassuringly short time considering it was the first time a flare had been used. Jason hadn’t given him the best explanation, but left him with a slurring Stephanie and the promise that he’d be back at base by nightfall. Dick probably would have disapproved. He’d want Jason to take Stephanie home and fill in the others and organize an actual search for him. But Jason still did lone wolf better than he did teams and he wasn’t about to wait around for hours when Dick was out there, trapped under rubble and waiting for him.

The good news was that the cave was devoid of blood or human remains. Dick definitely hadn’t been crushed in the initial collapse, had probably escaped through the opening Jason had seen in the back of the cave. The bad news was the collapse had covered the opening and Jason had to resign himself to moving rubble again, uncovering the road to his lover piece by piece. By the time he dug out the hole and could move forward without an obstacle, the sun was sinking behind the horizon and it was looking like he’d have to break that promise to Tim.

He couldn’t leave Dick out overnight.

Jason threw one last look at the darkening sky, took one last deep breath of clean air, and was turning back towards the underground when he noticed a dark figure stalking towards him. If it hadn’t looked so familiar, Jason might have taken a shot at it. Instead, he watched as Cass approached quickly and silently. She picked her way across the destruction as easily as Dick did, light on her feet.

“I could have killed you,” he informed her as she drew near. Her reply was a heavy look that Jason could only interpret as blatant doubt. “What are you doing out here anyway?”

“Tim,” Cass answered simply and, really, it was enough. Between an injured Stephanie, a distracted Jason, and an absence of Dick, of course the Replacement was going to be worried. Of course Cass was going to be worried. Jason could at least be grateful the other three were staying safe.

“Right. Well, if you’re coming you should know where we’re going.” Jason gestured to the dark hole below them. “Dick’s in there, and we’ve gotta find him before he dies of hypothermia, the idiot. It’s gonna fucking suck, though. There was a collapse. It’ll be hard to breathe and see.”

“For Dick,” Cass said, shaking her head like Jason’s warnings were paltry, meaningless to her.  _ Fair enough. _ If it was Jason, he’d be even more impatient and fuck the danger warnings.

“For Dick,” he agreed, and then clapped to ward off any emotional tone that might foster. “Let’s get to it, then.”

This time, when Jason turned to go after Dick, he was stopped by a hand on his arm. Cass was tugging him up, away from the one place he could expect Dick to be. He turned on her with an exasperated noise he turned into something angry by the end, but she was looking past his shoulder. Up, above them at ground level. So he followed her gaze to another dark figure stumbling through the street.

* * *

Dick didn’t really pass out. He wanted to, between the painfully blinding light and the complete mute on all of his other senses, but he didn’t. He sat in a dazed, dumb state and as soon as the light overtook him it began to fade. He could do nothing but wait for it to fade away completely, stunned and in pain and blinking the stars from his eyes.

Then he sat for a while longer, trying to blink the hallucination away. Because it had to be a hallucination, the miles of ruin and desolation surrounding him on all sides. The devastation stretching as far as he could see, visible in all its horror under a bright afternoon sun. There was no way a machine that small had created an explosion big enough to cause  _ this,  _ and no way he’d lived through it if it did.

But the hellscape didn’t waver as he blinked, didn’t shift back to something that made sense. Either Dick was dead, or he was somewhere that just wasn’t going to make sense no matter how long he stared at it. Whatever it was, he eventually decided nothing would come from sitting around like an invalid. He would have to get up, pick a direction, and hope he came across something.  _ Water.  _ The sun was hot on his back and he’d already been dehydrated and starving in that cell. He’d be dead soon if he didn’t find shelter and water.

Dick kept the sun at his back and limped his way through the destroyed city. His ankle was still screaming in agony beneath his weight and sometimes gave way completely. He scraped his knees raw and cut his hands catching himself more than once, crawled his way over piles of cracked concrete and slid awkwardly down the other side. There was no clear patch of earth in his way. The ground was an uneven terrain of crumpled cement and toppled buildings, large craters of scorched rubble and towers of precariously balanced materials dotting the landscape.

Dick was sweating within minutes and swaying on his feet soon after. He’d worked himself to exhaustion many times in his life  _ (-Blockbuster don’t think about Blockbuster don’t-) _ but not since he moved in with Jason. His boyfriend was pretty insistent on things like three meals a day and multiple hours of sleep every night, and had decided to force his philosophy on Dick. It had been a long time since Dick was swaying with the effort of staying upright but still pushing through, still pushing hunger and thoughts of giving up and the strain of his own weakened muscles  _ out of his way  _ because the job wasn’t done.

And to his memory, he’d never done it with such disheartening scenery. It would be easier to get through if there was something to hold onto, a goal in view or his family’s voices in his ear or a mission to complete. Dick walked for hours as the sun tracked across the sky and he didn’t see anything resembling a secure shelter or clean water. He felt more alone than he’d possibly ever felt before-it was as if there was nothing alive left in the world, no animals or plants or people. No sounds of any movement, just Dick’s labored breathing and stumbling steps.

It was almost sunset before Dick saw any sign of life, and it was so far off he almost didn’t recognize it as such. The two dark shapes blended into the broken background of destruction too well, and he was much closer before he recognized them as people. He was even closer before he recognized- _ of course _ -that helmet.  _ Jason’s  _ helmet. And it was Cass next to him, in her familiar Batgirl suit.

Dick tried to take a hurried step and nearly fell again, forced to turn it into a desperate stumble to stay upright. When he caught his balance Jason had already started running towards him, racing with Cass. It was Jason who reached him first, Jason who dragged him in by his shoulders and tore off the helmet and took his weight onto a leather-clad chest and crushed his lips in a fierce kiss. Dick had questions, wanted to ask  _ what happened, where’re the others, are you okay, where is  _ Damian,  _ ARE YOU OKAY. _

But Jason was holding him with that bruising strength that made Dick’s toes curl and holding him up off his fucked ankle and it had been  _ so long  _ since he’d been able to kiss his boyfriend, and he was going to fucking enjoy it for a moment.  _ And what a kiss it was. _ Jason’s fingers were pressing into his shoulders heavy and hard, lips moving against his own like Jason was as desperate as he was, as starved for their affection as he’d been. Then Jason’s hand moved up to cup the back of his head, push him closer in a way he’d never done before, and he started kissing along Dick’s jaw and mumbling curses in between.

“Idiot,” he said, and, “Reckless. Jackass. Fucker.”

It might as well have been a love letter, from Jason.

“Dick?” Cass asked, hesitant because she knew she was interrupting. Dick turned his face to look at her and Jason continued pressing kisses into his hair, along his ear, on his cheek. “Hurt?”

Dick flexed his injured hand, leaned into Jason and off his ankle, and Jason finally stopped showering him in kisses. Dick felt the loss like a wound, but he knew it was better to focus on everything that had gone so terribly wrong now. Like always, kissing Jason would have to wait for later. Jason flexed his fingers against Dick’s shoulders and then stepped back, holding a wavering Dick at arm’s length.

“Yeah, actually. What  _ happened _ to you?”

“What? What do you mean?” Dick looked down at himself in confusion, but saw nothing different than the last time he’d been in Jason’s grip. His hand had stopped bleeding but was caked with dried blood. His ankle had probably swelled some with all the walking Dick had done, but nothing that wouldn’t be expected. Some of the cuts along his chest had torn open again during his journey and blood was leaking through the tears in his suit. Overall, he looked the same as he had in the lab before the explosion had-somehow-sent him here.

“I mean, look at you. Who did this?” Jason reached for his hand, staring at the same missing nails that hadn’t been there before. “And how did you…how did you get so thin?”

Judging by Jason’s tone, he’d already figured out something that was just beginning to dawn on Dick.  _ Something was very wrong. _

**Author's Note:**

> My ideas for this one got bigger than what I was trying to write. You may notice this fic has some loose ends (scientists, a missing Dick, the cause of the apocalypse, possible experimentation, etc.) that I didn't want to fill out in this one. (I think) I'm pretty happy where I ended this as a look into that world, but I'm putting it into a series because I came up with a lot of other stuff in this world that I'd like to show you. Let me know if that's something you want to see and maybe subscribe to the series so you'll know when an update comes.


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